Cloud Contact Centers on the Rise in South Africa: Report
July 19, 2012
By Erin Harrison
Executive Editor, Cloud Computing
The adoption of cloud-based communications at contact centers in South Africa is forecast to accelerate over the next five years, according to an industry analyst who spoke at ITWeb’s Virtualization and Cloud Computing Summit this week.
Ishe Zingoni, an ICT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), said that in 2011, the adoption of cloud computing by local call center was still in the “development stage” of the market cycle, ITWeb reported – but is poised for rapid growth.
Zingoni said in the next five years, the cloud computing market will increase from $41 billion to $241 billion.
In South Africa, cloud computing has progressed from the development phase of the market cycle to the growth stage, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) seeing steady uptake.
According to Frost & Sullivan, in the next five years, hosted contact center will account for 22 percent to 24 percent of call centers, compared with 8 percent currently.
“This growth will be the result of contact centers moving to the cloud, and also the emergence of new contact centers, which will be hosted from the onset,” the report said.
According to Zingoni, the drivers toward hosted solutions include a lowered total cost of ownership, as well as the attractiveness of the OPEX (News - Alert) model over the CAPEX model.
In South Africa, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is also expected to increase in adoption, Frost & Sullivan said earlier this month. In a rush to maximize cloud revenue and attract customers, providers are now creating PaaS services that ride on top of their cloud infrastructure services, or underlie their cloud software services, according to Chantel Lindeman, Frost & Sullivan’s head of Information and Communication Technologies for Africa.
“Because PaaS is more than mere application development, success is not restricted to companies that have a history of commercial software development,” Lindeman said. “Communication service providers, and cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), are charging into the PaaS market alongside software companies like Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com.”
While security and performance concerns still exist, they are not as prevalent – with many organizations opting for private cloud solutions, she added.
“Despite further misconceptions surrounding the issue of cloud, such as that of security risk, and reliability and performance of connectivity in South Africa, private clouds have managed to ease the concerns of companies looking to implement a cloud solution,” Lindeman said.
Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct 2-5, in Austin, TX. The Cloud Communications Expo will address the growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. For more information on registering for the Cloud Communications Expo click here.
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Edited by Braden Becker
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